“Getting short,” I said. “They accepted my application for a halfway house. If I get a four-month halfway house, I’ll be out of here in May.”
“That’s only eight more months,” Miss Reed said.
“I know. I really can’t complain. What’s eight months?”
I work, eat, read, walk, have independent and extremely safe sex, and receive visitors. That’s what I do.
They say you learn who your real friends are at times like this. Many of the prisoners have gone to great effort to hide the fact that they are here. Their families often claim they’re working “overseas” or are “on assignment.” I have no such refuge, but it’s better. I know everybody knows I’m here, and it’s a big relief. My friends do not desert me. John O’Connor, the drawing professor who almost witnessed my exploding drawing, and his wife, Mallory (my former art history teacher), come to visit several times; Joe Leps and Nikki Ricciuti visit me with their daughter Zubi; Merv Wetherley, a childhood chum who taught me to fly in high school, a bush pilot in Alaska, saw my story in Time magazine at an Eskimo trading post and comes to visit; my parents come several times. I have a picture of my mother and me together in the visiting room; it looks like the one in which we posed together on the occasion of my being a new freshman at college, except we’re both older and I’m in prison blues. Jack and his girlfriend, Wallie, come with Patience now and then. Wallie is like a daughter to Patience. Jack started going to the University of Florida when I came to prison, but dropped out. He claims he isn’t bothered by my being in jail, but I don’t see how it could not have affected him. He is very bright, but he is distracted, isn’t sure what he wants to do. He loves music and practices guitar regularly. He loves playing Ultimate Frisbee (a team sport played something like hockey except with a Frisbee). He loves Wallie, too. He does not love going to school to learn things he doubts he needs to know.
Some of the press visit, though I am not now much of a story. The local paper, the Fort Walton Beach Daily News, sent a reporter, Bruce Rolfsen, to interview me. The warden accompanied us while we walked around the camp. Rolfsen asked me how long I’d been at Eglin. I told him thirteen months and that “I’m now more than half rehabilitated.” I smiled at the warden. “In another year, I will be a hundred percent safe for society.”
The warden looked sour. He did not like jokes like that. When Rolfsen asked me what I thought about people using marijuana, I said—quoting a line from Jeff MacNelly’s cartoon strip, Shoe, “Smoking marijuana will cause your body to be thrown into jail.”
The warden didn’t like that, either, but this is a free country. The remark was printed as I said it.
Miss Reed worked every day in the commissary office and every night running the commissary line. She petitioned the administration for help and, after several months, they hired someone.
One day Miss Reed showed up with the new guy in tow. His name was Holbrook. Holbrook was quiet and nervously observant of us, the inmates. He’d gone to hack school and knew all the rules. He told us he’d worked at the FBI.
“An FBI agent?” Leone asked.
“You might say that,” Holbrook said mysteriously. Inmates are not allowed to grill hacks, so we left it at that. His nickname became Elliott Ness.
Elliott Ness was an intrusion into our comfortable relationship with Miss Reed. When he first ran the line without Miss Reed, he pat-searched Leone and Frank when they left. They were outraged: What? You don’t trust us? Elliott Ness explained that it was the rule.
Holbrook’s nickname became especially ironic when we finally got him to tell us what his job had been at the FBI. He had been a file clerk. On Miss Reed’s days on, we made jokes about Elliott Ness the wastebasket monitor, Elliott Ness the file duster. Miss Reed told us she didn’t want to hear that and to leave the poor man alone. Whatever Miss Reed said, we did. No more Elliott Ness jokes in front of Miss Reed.
At the next commissary inventory, we came up short two thousand dollars’ worth of goods. The shortages were blamed on Elliott Ness, he being the only new variable in the operation. This was a source of great mirth to Leone and Frank. After an investigative inventory, and after the dust cleared, Miss Reed told us she knew we must be stealing stuff when Mr. Holbrook was running things. “It’s not just illegal,” she said, “it’s downright nasty. That man can’t help it if he was a file clerk. He’s just trying to make a living and you guys want to hurt him for that? He could lose his job if we come up short again. You leave him alone, or you’ll answer to me.”
The next inventory was right on.
On December 27, Waterhead called me out of work. He told me my father had had a stroke. “I just talked to his doctor. He says he probably won’t make it,” he said.
I nodded, looking down at the floor, feeling the helplessness piling up. Nannie, my dad’s mother, had died three months before and I wasn’t allowed to go to her funeral.
“You aren’t due for a furlough for two months. We can let you take one now, a five-day furlough, but it’ll replace the one you’ve got coming. You want to do that?”
“Of course I do. My father’s dying.”
“I figured you would. I already talked to your wife. She’ll be here tomorrow morning. You’ll be cleared to go as soon as she arrives.”
Patience picked me up the next morning at eight. She said that the doctors said it was bad, but if my father made it through the next three days, he might live. She also said that she’d stayed in a motel last night and she still had the room. Why should we waste it? “In your condition, I’ll bet you’d finish in a couple of seconds. Wanna?”
After a ten-minute delay at the motel, we were on the road for the six-hour drive to Gainesville.
My dad lay in bed, pale. He couldn’t talk, but he knew we were there. Patience told him we’d stopped for a minute to get laid and he smiled. I sat beside the bed and held his hand. He didn’t seem to notice. His whole right side was paralyzed. I told him they were going to let me stay around for five days and he smiled again.
There wasn’t much to do except wait. My emotions were in an uproar. I felt good that I was walking around like a real person again, but I felt terrible seeing my dad like that.
I went out in the hall and listened to my mother and my aunt talking over and over about the attack. “He was feeding his chickens,” my mother said. “I wondered where he was; he was later than usual. Then I looked outside and saw him lying on the ground.”
Later my mother asked, “Are you going to spend the night here?”
“I’ll stay around until I get tired,” I said. “I don’t see what staying here will do for him.”
“He’ll know you’re here, Bob,” my mother said.
“He’s asleep most of the time, Mom. He needs the rest.”
“You never do what I want you to do,” my mother said.
“Mom,” I said, “I’ve been in jail for sixteen months. I won’t get another furlough. I’ll be here most of the time, but I want to spend some time with Patience and Jack. You know, try to patch my life back together?”
“Your dad is lying in there dying and all you can think about is yourself,” my mother said.
“Mom. You’re his wife. Where will you be?”
My mother glared at me. “Nobody cares how I feel,” she said. “You just don’t know how this has affected me. Everybody’s worried about him. What about me? Now I have chest pains. I have to go home and take care of all those damn animals he collected.”
“Don’t worry about the animals, Betty,” my aunt said. “I know what to do. I was helping Jack—”
“I need to rest,” my mother said. “Chest pains. I have to go home.”